Looking for a low cost solution for referral marketing (service based product) - any tips?

Some products offer awards. If you decide against that then the set up can be coded custom for a few hundred, one time cost. What is your tech stack!

Hi Daniella,

I'm assuming this is for Scribly.io

If so, then I'm going to be a bit of a pain in the ass and suggest that, at your size/revenue, you shouldn't automate away your referral marketing.

Here's why:

Automated referral programs work really well when the potential market is large and loosely defined, and the price of the product is low.

That way, your customers are happy to share, you reach the maximum amount of people (because you aren't exactly sure who'd be a good customer and who wouldn't) and, because of the low cost of trying the product, some of these people are happy to try it out.

So if you were building something like AirBnB or Typeform, I'd totally recommend you try out a tool that can automate one of those campaigns for you. Something like ViralLoops for example.

But Scribly isn't like Typeform or AirBnB.

You have real marginal costs associated with serving your customers. And your customers, while specific and not a huge market, are worth a lot of money (relatively speaking).

So instead I'd make the referral process as manual as possible.

Think of it more like sales than marketing.

Here's how I'd go about it:

1. Take a look at your customer journey. What are the magic moments in that journey when they are super excited by the value of the product? Maybe it's when they receive their first piece of copywriting for example. Another might be when that piece is published.

2. At the exact time your customer is flying high on their magic moment, reach out and get some referrals. The trick though, is to do your homework first...

3. The customer might not want to /be able to think of potential referrals off the top of their head. So find some. Find contacts of theirs on LinkedIn who you think would be a good customer. Suggest other people they might know. Then even provide them with a sample email/message they can forward. Be sure to follow up.

4. Parallel, get them to do the referral work for you by sharing their awesome work on Twitter/LinkedIn etc. Congratulate them for having the brains and marketing skills to work with you to produce such brilliant content. Praise them and put the spotlight on them, not you. Tag them (personally). Chances are, they'll share and boast about that favourably to many more potential customers than if you just asked them to share a referral link.

5. If you even need a reward/incentive on the current customer end, make sure it's realistic and something they genuinely think is worth their while putting effort into attaining. Doing this manually helps.

I hope you found that useful. It's not exactly what you were looking for, but it is a much better way to get from ~$10k MRR to $50k+ MRR...

If you have any questions, just comment here or shoot me an email. I've been building these partnerships/referral/channel sales programs for B2B startups for close to a decade now and always happy to help :)